Raphael Saadiq - 100 Yard Dash

What this video is

Released in January 2009, '100 Yard Dash' arrived at a moment when Raphael Saadiq's The Way I See It was being widely heralded as one of the most authentic exercises in retro-soul since the genre's 1990s peak. The New York Times named it among the top-five singles of 2008. The video's deliberate visual language — black-and-white photography, Blue Note and Reprise album-cover graphic aesthetics, tungsten studio…

Why it matters

A benchmark artifact of the late-2000s retro-soul movement. The video codifies neo-soul's visual manifesto: live-band performance, monochrome photography, typographic album-art design, and period-appropriate tailoring — all functioning as a coherent anti-mainstream statement during an era…

The director

Norman Seeff (b. March 5, 1939, Johannesburg, South Africa) trained as a medical doctor before emigrating to the United States in 1968 to pursue photography and filmmaking. He became creative director of United Artists Records and later established an…